Everyone I know my age is against the lockdown, except for one friend of mine who is morbidly obese and shitting his pants. I thought of a comparison today that you lads would probably relate to - I was thinking about how it’s like in England in the 1980s everyone in trendy London circles was saying that they were against Thatcher. Then Thatcher would win the elections and the younger generation would just look at each other in shock, wondering, “Who are these people? Where are they?”
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On Thatcher you have to remember the UK economy was a basket case in the 70s and recovered in the 80s. I remember talking to a few old lads in a pub in Ireland in the early 90s who had spent most of their working lives in London and they said something I found hard to believe at the time but later came to understand. Their basic point was that when the Tories were in power there was more money around and no shortage of work. People vote in their own self interest or at least what they perceive to be their own self interest, and no amount of second guessing by experts telling them they are wrong tends to change that.
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Leo has inadvertently revealed the government strategy for dealing with the over crowding of hospitals.
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we’ll be still dealing with this shit next summer and beyond … nobody has a clue what to do…
Big Jock knew.
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It’s some mess alright and the numbers of false positives and negatives hardly helps.
I’m not sure I see the point of testing with the way things are. You test neagative and you’re advised to limit your movements/isolate anyway and if you test positive there may or may not be any contact tracing done.
The whole thing is doomed to failure.
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We need to go back to the old way of thinking where the hospitals overflowed every winter and noone gave a fuck.
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That’s quite a post from a chap who deleted his previous handle and got the shits that his employer might obtain info of his postings here. 
Throughout the pandemic, the government and its scientific advisers have made constant predictions, projections and illustrations regarding the behaviour of Covid-19. Their figures are never revisited as the Covid narrative unfolds, which means we are not given an idea of the error margin. A look back at the figures issued shows that the track record, eventually validated against the facts, is abysmal. This is important because major decisions continue to be taken on the strength of such data. There have been several noteworthy failings so far.
1) Overstating of the number of people who are going to die
This starts with the now-infamous Imperial College London (ICL) ‘Report 9’ that modelled 500,000 deaths if no action was taken at all, and 250,000 deaths if restrictions were not tightened. This set the train of lockdown restrictions in motion. Some argue that Imperial’s modelling may have come true had it not been for lockdown. But this does not explain Sweden. Academics there said its assumptions would mean 85,000 deaths if Sweden did not lock down. It did not – and deaths are just under 6,000.
2) Leaked SAGE papers
Next came a print paper written by SAGE members to support a two-week ‘circuit breaker’, leaked to the press. The reports were striking.
“‘With no social distancing measures in place from now until January, the virus could potentially spiral out of control and kill 217,000 people, hospitalise 316,000 and infect 20.7 million. But with a strict two-week lockdown the number of deaths could be reduced by 100,000, admissions by 139,000 and infections by 6 million.’
Understandably, this made headlines. But when the lead author was interviewed by the BBC, he said that he wished he ‘hadn’t put these numbers in the study’ because it was an extreme scenario only included ‘for illustration’.
3) Miscategorisation of ‘Covid death’
Under the original system, someone run over by a bus would be counted as a ‘Covid death’ if he or she had tested positive for Covid but later recovered. When this anomaly was pointed out by the Oxford Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine, it turned out even the Health Secretary was unaware what the Covid death data referred to. He ordered an immediate inquiry. This illustrates how poor-quality data from Public Health England was misleading the government itself. A new system was eventually set up: counting deaths within 28 days of a positive Covid-19 test. This removed 4,149 deaths from the 15 July death count.
4) Overstating the effect of lockdown on reducing virus transmission
On 17 March Patrick Vallance, the Chief Scientific Adviser, stated that keeping the coronavirus death toll in the UK to less than 20,000 would be ‘a good outcome’ – yet on 16 July he had to admit the UK’s coronavirus outcome had ‘not been good’. After lockdown, a range of 7,000 to 20,000 deaths was given by Professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College London. UK Covid deaths are now approaching 45,000.
5) Exaggerating Covid’s impact on hospitals
A leaked NHS report written in April warned that the UK would need 25,000 hospital beds to treat Covid patients ‘well into July’. However, on 24 July the daily count of confirmed Covid-19 patients in hospital was 928 in England and 1,356 across the UK, or just 5 per cent of the prediction.
6) E xaggerated fears about lifting lockdown
Imperial’s ‘Report 20’ on 4 May, contains a prediction of tens of thousands of deaths in Italy within three weeks of reopening. Yet by 30 June, just 23 daily deaths had been reported (lockdown officially ended on 4 May and internal travel restrictions on 3 June). On 29 May, SAGE advisors stated that ‘Covid-19 was spreading too fast to lift lockdown in England’. The mobility index (based on the request for map indications from the web) in June was around 20 per cent over the norm for the month for the UK, yet cases continued to decline to a low of 624 on 30 June.
7) The Vallance graph
On 21 September, Sir Patrick Vallance held a press conference where he sought to raise public support for further restrictions. The only graph he showed was one where cases doubled every seven days. This time, at least, the ‘scenario’ could be measured against reality. The Vallance chart showed infections hitting 50,000 cases a day by 13 October without action. His graph did not lead to any change in policy and when this day arrived, the moving average was 16,228.
8) The Excel spreadsheet blunder
This was blamed on a Covid testing glitch that led to 16,000 missed cases and up to 50,000 untraced contacts who should otherwise have been self-isolating. Added to this are grave errors about the overall quality of the data, further undermining confidence in the system.
9) Reluctance to acknowledge uncertainties in evidence
Let’s take the two-metre rule. Sir Patrick Vallance told the Health and Social Care Committee on the 5 May that ‘a minute at two metres contact is about the same risk as six seconds at one metre’. He added: ‘That gives you some idea of why the two metres becomes important. The risk at one metre is about 10 to 30 times higher than the risk at two metres, so the distancing is an important part of this’. On 4 June, SAGE gave a very different estimate: at one metre it could be two to 10 times higher than at two metres they reported. So, who got it right? A one-size-fits-all two metre social distancing rule, however, is inconsistent with the underlying science of exhalations and indoor air. The majority of existing evidence is observational and non-peer-reviewed, depending very much on populations, study settings, sample collection methods and primary outcome. Such studies do not allow a definition of a specific relative risk of SARS-CoV-2 at different distances.
10) Lack of access and transparency in data
The Manchester Evening News asked for trust-by-trust Covid admissions numbers as a proportion of overall capacity in Greater Manchester. Six out of seven relevant trusts did not comply with the request. Wigan, Wrightington and Leigh said that ‘we are unable to provide figures - these will be issued at national level’, while none others replied. We were advised that a Freedom of Information request was required to obtain the data and it would take up to 21 days for a response. At the Oxford University Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine, we have also had access to essential healthcare data blocked. But we are aware of important data, used to set lockdown restrictions, that are not in the public domain. This disturbing lack of transparency in what is a global public health and economic crisis hinders our understanding.
All told, the production, dissemination and use of data in the UK paints a disturbing picture. Over the course of this pandemic, we have observed outright errors, misunderstandings of effects, too much certainty being reported by advisors and interpretation lacking the normal context. So are lockdown decisions being taken on a false premise? Without transparency, how can errors be detected?
Poor quality of death data leaves us unable to say for certain who died because of Covid, who died with Covid as a cofactor – and who died of Covid after contracting the infection in hospital. Deaths outside hospitals are not subject to detailed analysis, despite their importance. The use of the word ‘cases’ implies that all cases are the same. They are not. Those who really matter are the contagious and the gravely ill (with the two categories overlapping). This data is not reported presumably because the numbers are not known and are lost in the testing frenzy.
Rather than be cautious in the use of such data, the government’s approach has been publishing worst-case scenarios. These assumptions so far have largely proven to be unreasonable and, all too often, flatly incorrect. However, we have shown that this realisation has had little effect on the approach. This leaves the public – and policymakers – in a hopeless position when it comes to navigating our way out of this mess.
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The paper of record leading the charge in open it up to fuck
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Deh dah.
You should post that in the correct thread, mate.
Deh dah.
Okay. I happily acknowledge such levelness reflects well on you after testy exchanges. Far more on you than on me, and happily so. But I still think that I am right, in an impersonal sense, about certain matters. And I think you need to withdraw certain ludicrous (and loathsome, frankly) comments – but I will come back to all that craic.
Core point: you are not able to deal with your own nihilism. That craic is your burden, one that middle age should ordinarily have expunged.
On those immediately raised issues, we certainly do agree on a lot. Agreed:
– Early teens to late twenties: yes, crucial, for reasons you say. Changing behaviour proved possible in the 1980s and 1990s with HIV and condoms, for instance. There was that important precedent about a state’s ability to alter young people’s behaviour. The Irish government has been terribly slack on realizing the cohort you identify is key to containing this virus. A certain level of infection, without intervention, becomes maths. You need to acknowledge this truth, by the way.
– You are entirely correct about the ludicrousness of a ‘Zero Covid’ strategy. I do not need to go into the reasons. Any sensible person sees why. Containment, before a vaccine lands, has to be the way forward. But containment involves many complex and difficult decisions – a truth you need to acknowledge, the near side of bullshine metaphysics.
– Yes, protecting the vulnerable has to be foremost in any rightful state’s duty to its members. On this topic, we can go from John Locke to Michael Oakeshott to John Rawls, mapping the same truth. A state only gains a secure future by ensuring, at times of crisis, equal treatment in principle for all of its members, even if in practice such treatment ends up skewed. The Union between Britain and Ireland severed in effect during the Great Famine of the mid 1840s, when people in Youghal were not treated as if they were from Yorkshire, which in constitutional terms they were. Isaac Butt, previously a Unionist, drew this truth. 1916 began in 1846. Hence the need, with this virus, to ensure all members of the 26 county Irish state are equally treated, irrespective of age, because what endures in people’s memory is the clarifying fires of crisis. A state, end of day, is only its members’ collective memory. While I obviously accept the acute economic cost of lockdown in 2020, there is an important argument that says a state’s investment in its own collectivity, whatever the immediate cost, will come in time to seem cheap. True historical change is not wet rot, visible to everyone; true historical change is dry rot, visible at the time to few. Investment in avoiding dry rot will forever involve a tarriff simultaneously the most expensive and the cheapest, 2020 or anytime else.
I do not agree trying to ‘spread out’ infection in teenagers and twenty somethings is or was the best approach. That delusion is an inflection of the ‘herd immunity’ delusion. There is no science behind the ‘herd immunity’ imperative, which is precisely why said imperative is a delusion . Even Anders Tegnell and associates admitted the ‘Swedish’ approach did not lead anything like the immunity levels anticipated. ‘Herd Immunity’ is merely the glove of ‘Zero Covid’ pulled inside out Can you really not grasp this point? No sensible person seeks an answer to complex problems in slick banalities and polished simplicities. For the moment, the macro approach has to be containment – and this approach, as any sensible person appreciates, involves torturously complex decisions.
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Deh dah.
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Can you all stop with the negativity and doom and gloom please?
This lock down is over in five and a half weeks, after that the numbers will be well down. We’ll all have a normal Christmas and the new year will bring the vaccine. Chin up people, we’ll be grand.
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Not addressed to you, mate.
Apologies… Bit scrambled.